


it's a love song, and we’re gonna sing it again

by rainny_days



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: (referring to junba), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artist!Ohno, Fluff, Hades!Jun, Hadestown Crossover, Hermes!Sho, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Love at First Sight, M/M, Magical Realism, Marriage Proposal, Married Couple, Musician!Nino, Persephone!Aiba, Reunions, Separations, Spirits, Underworld, You know how this goes, lots of them - Freeform, no background knowledge of hadestown necessary, or hadestown, so if u know that, the death thing is a given bc hades
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-05-30 22:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19412296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainny_days/pseuds/rainny_days
Summary: Once upon a time, a poor young artist saw a hungry young songbird, and promised to change the world for him.Once upon a time, the god of the underworld saw the god of spring, and built a city to keep him his.Two love stories, told in seasons.





	1. 1//summer

**Author's Note:**

> ohhhh boy guys. i birthed this monstrosity in three days of fevered writing, tears in my eyes, after listening to the hadestown soundtrack on loop for the last month and watching the 5x20 pv. this is the longest thing i've ever completed, so buckle up y'all because we're about to have a long ride.
> 
> if you haven't listened to hadestown already, it is AMAZING and totally worth being your latest obsession. so many times in this fic have i wanted to just write '*insert [entire hadestown number] here*' instead of trying to translate that poetry into shitty fic prose. 
> 
> if you aren't sure where to get started, since there's like three versions of each song floating out there and i used a mix of all of the albums, i'll put links to the songs i listened to for each chapter (along w links) in order of when they appear. i don't necessarily recommend listening as you read bc,,,,,,it'll make my fic sound like shit, but i think it's fun to compare afterwards!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the chapters are already written, so i'm gonna put them up as soon as i finish editing each one, which means im guessing 2-5 days between updates, so tune in!!

Nino doesn't remember this, but Ohno does.

“Anybody got a match?”

Ohno looks up from his sketchbook, startled by the sudden voice that cut through the low chatter of the bar. A boy is weaving through the (mostly sparse) tables, raising an eyebrow at the few patrons he sees. There’s something familiar about him, but Ohno can't quite put his finger on what it is- it’s only his second time to this bar, after all, after he finally grew tired of the constant silence of his own little alcove.

He puts his hand in his pocket, not really expecting to find anything, but blinks when it comes out with a small matchbox, three matches still lying innocently within. He raises his head, but before he can speak, the boy is already at his table, plucking the box from his fingertips.

“Give me that,” the boy says, voice like a song. He takes one of the matches out and lights it, relighting the lantern to its former glory, turning to raise it to the rest of the bar with a dramatic flourish to scattered applause. He turns back to Ohno, face now lit with the warm light of the flame, and tosses the box back.

“Thanks, stranger,” he says, smile sweet and sharp, and strolls back to his bar. Ohno realizes, with a startled burst of understanding, what was so familiar about him.

It’s the barkeep, the one who sings to himself when the light is low and the business slow. The one who’s voice called Ohno to the bar, the first time, when he’d felt alone and without inspiration in his dark room.

Ohno stares at his back for a long time, and then picks up his pencil.

* * *

“Come home with me,” The strange man says, smiling small and a little sly, leaning against the wall of Nino’s bar. Nino raises an eyebrow at him.

“Do I know you?” he replies, arch. Ohno doesn't look perturbed by his tone, smile only widening.

“I’m Ohno Satoshi,” Ohno says. “And I’m the man who’s going to marry you.” Nino is startled into a laugh, staring at this strange, utterly confident man.

“And  _ who  _ are you marrying?” he asks, amused enough to humor him. “Do you even know my name?”

“Nino,” Ohno replies serenely. “Ninomiya Kazunari. The man who’s going to become my husband.”

Nino shakes his head, smiling despite himself. “You’re ridiculous. We haven’t even met.”

“We just did,” Ohno points out. “And besides, I know you- you’re my muse.”

“Your muse, huh,” Nino raises an eyebrow, eyes flickering to the sketchbook in Ohno’s hands. “So you’re an artist?”

Ohno grins and does a twirl. “I’ve also been known to dance, on occasion.”

“Oh, a  _ dancer _ , too,” Nino says, feigning surprise. “I suppose you’re one of the customers that makes a ruckus in our bar every night?”

“Not  _ every _ night,” Ohno says, looking almost sheepish at being caught out. Nino rolls his eyes.

“I see,” he says, turning around. “Run off, lover, I’ve met enough men like you.”

Ohno moves towards him, so that their eyes catch one another. “You’re wrong, you’ve never met anyone like me.”

“How arrogant can you get?” Nino shoots back. He should be more annoyed, he knows, but Ohno is so small in his tattered jacket, his face and fingers smudged with charcoal, his hair messy and his clothes dotted with paint, that Nino can't seem to think of him as anything more than a fumbling suitor. He stops walking away, looks Ohno in the eyes more steadily. Raises an eyebrow. “Are you secretly a genius, or something? Hiding some gold in those threadbare holes you call pockets?” 

“Nope,” Ohno says, without a hint of embarrassment in his voice. “I have something better.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“You see the world?” he takes the hand holding his sketchbook and waves it around them, sweeping over grimy streets, worn-down buildings, boarded windows. The same scenes that Nino has known all his life.

Nino blinks, confused. “Yes?”

“I can make it beautiful. I  _ will _ make it beautiful, for you.”

He sounds so sure that it stuns Nino into silence for a moment, before he regains his bearings and grins, charmed in spite of himself at the not-stranger’s sheer audacity. “And how will you do that?” he asks.

“With this,” Ohno holds out his sketchbook. Nino tilts his head back and laughs, more freely than he’d thought he’d be able to, in the winter months.

“Oh, Mister Artist, I’m sure you draw very well,” he says, once his laugh warbles down into a smirk. “But only the gods can change the way that the world is. I should know, I’m the one who hands them a drink and a snack while they do it.”

“You haven't seen anything I’ve drawn yet,” Ohno says, sketchbook still outstretched, insistent.

Nino takes it with an indulgent smile. “Are you always like this?” he asks, curious. “So...sure of yourself?”

Ohno smiles. “Always, if it’s you. You make me sure of everything,” he says without reservation.

“And so capable of pulling out lines like  _ that _ ,” Nino says. “You’re pretty smooth, artist, I won't deny that. I can’t see why you’re focusing so much on me, though. I’m just the only chef at the only bar up top.”

“You’re amazing,” Ohno replies, not even blinking. “I’ve known since the first time I saw you. Since the first time I heard you sing.”

“Is  _ that  _ what it is,” Nino smiles, understanding dawning on him. “Sorry, lover, but my songs aren’t going to change anyone’s world. They didn’t even make me enough for a new jacket, for one.”

“Your voice is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” Ohno says, stubborn. “Your voice and your guitar. They make me want to paint, want to create. They make me want to change the world.”

“So passionate about a few chords and some drinking tunes,” Nino teases. “But if you’re that certain of it, let’s see how good of a muse I really am.”

He opens the sketchbook. Looks at the page. Stares.

Every page is of a different medium, a different subject, though the rough graphite grey of pencil and soft smudge of watercolor are most common. Landscapes that Nino has never seen before fill pages, lush and bright and reminiscent of a time that he can’t remember but somehow longs for. Gardens are the most common subject of his drawings, fruits and flowers drawn so vividly that his mouth starts watering with phantom hunger. Animals leap through pages and sunlight warms his hands where they’re touching the page, rivers run so clear that he can hear the rush of water. There are figures, too, men and women and those beyond and between dancing with intricate choreography, clothes flared with origami and tissue, hand-in-hand and eyes of shimmering pebbles and glass so bright that it’s hard to believe that they won’t start speaking at any moment. 

Nino finds himself, as well, often. He is at the edges of every page unless he’s in the centre, picking flowers and strumming his guitar and being spun in room that he recognises as his bar, all of it so detailed that he finds himself searching his mind for memories he could not possibly have.

“It’s-” he opens his mouth. Closes it. “It’s amazing. It almost makes me feel like- like everything is beautiful.” he flips a page. Then another. Another. “They’re  _ all  _ beautiful.” Ohno smiles at his words, smug, and Nino pulls himself back enough to give him an unamused look. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Some of these scenes, they can’t possibly exist. Not anymore. Not after-” he frowns, narrowing his eyes. “Are you a demigod? Why are you _ here _ , of all places, instead of showing your art to the world? Surely you can afford better than  _ that- _ ” he gestures to Ohno’s clothes. “-with talent like  _ this _ .” he waves at the sketchbook.

“Nah,” Ohno says easily, hurriedly elaborating when Nino continues to give him a flat look. He looks at Nino with the world in his eyes. “The art is only because of you,” he tells him, every word completely, painfully sincere. “All of it. Always, because of you.”

Nino looks at him, still. “I thought you were being cocky before, but these...these might actually make you famous. Convince the summer to linger, even.” he pauses. “We’ve got to show these to Masaki.”

* * *

“So,” Nino leans against the bar, smirk across his face. “I hear Masaki’s coming up early this year?”

The god on the barstool snorts into his glass of wine, one of only a handful of patrons who can afford to visit even this dingy little bar. “You and everyone,” he grouses. “They’re not exactly  _ subtle _ . But yes,  _ Lord Aiba  _ is coming in tomorrow.”

“Oh, come off it,” Nino squats at him lightly, dismissive. “Like anyone up here  _ actually  _ calls him Lord, no matter what fancy rings he’s wearing, or who they’re from. That’s what he likes about life up top, after all. No stupid crowns.”

Sho shrugs, the closest he’ll get to agreeing. Nino grins. “So,  _ Lord Sakurai _ , you going out to pick him up?”

“Please don't call me that,” Sho says. “It makes me feel like you’re about to spit in my drink. And yeah, I’m going to get him at the railway station- when do I not?”

“Great!” Nino chirps. “So I have a little favor to ask, for when you see him.”

Sho raises his eyebrows. “Why me?” he asks. “He does like you, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Nino says sweetly. “It’s hard not to. But no, I can’t ask. Much as I joke, he  _ is _ a god, and so are you. I do know that.”

“Is it something serious?” Sho’s temple furrows. “Nino, are you in trouble?”

“Hardly, not-a-lord Sho, I just wanted you to pass something on, see how Masaki likes it.”

He hands over a carefully folded page, the only one that Ohno had let him take from his sketchbook. It’s a piece of a garden, the faint shadows of two figures entwined in the centre of the page. He watches carefully as Sho unfolds the page. As he sees what’s on it. As his eyes widen.

“Where-” he stops. “What is this?”

“An Ohno Satoshi original,” Nino says, a bubble of  _ something _ expanding in his sternum. “You like it? I thought it might spruce up the underworld a little, give it some color- from what I’ve heard, it needs it.”

“This is...” Sho hesitates, then blinks in realization, and looks up at Nino. “Ohno? The young artist? The one who sits at the corner nearly every night and stares at you all night?”

Nino chokes, staring. “How- what- am I the only one who didn't know this guy?”

“It  _ is _ !” Something like glee washes over Sho’s face as he undoubtedly runs through all the things Nino has teased him about over the years, and realizes that he finally has one up over him. “We were all betting on when - or if - he’ll ever actually manage to ask you out, you know. When did this happen? It can't have been very long, if I just found out.”

“Confident, aren't you?” Nino raises an eyebrow at him, refuses to acknowledge the hints of pink on his face. 

“I am a god, you know.  _ The  _ messenger? Knowing gossip kind of falls in line with that.” Sho continues to stare, until Nino relents with a huff.

“Fine,” he grumbles. “It was yesterday, alright? He was waiting for me when I closed up shop.”

Sho’s eyes widen. “And you  _ didn’t  _ punch him for being a creep?”

“He had a cute butt, okay,” Nino grumbles out, not mentioning that said butt was completely invisible under his long coat. “Anyways, if you’ve known for so long, you should’ve told me- a _ look at that cute guy ogling you _ would’ve sufficed.”

“I didn't think he was your type!” Sho protests. 

“What did you think  _ was _ my type?”

Sho gives him a Look. “Not poor, for one.”

Nino has to give him that. “W- _ ell _ ,” he drags out, reluctant. “He doesn’t  _ have  _ to be.  _ You  _ can see that as well as I do.”

“I have to admit, this was beyond my expectations,” Sho says. “This is- I’m millennia old, Nino, and this almost makes me feel young again. How can he  _ see _ all this?”

“He says that this is the world he dreams of,” Nino confesses, voice hushed though he isn't quite sure why. “The way that it’s supposed to be.”

Sho’s gaze lingers on the paper, then back at Nino. “He might be right,” he says, finally, tucking the paper into the pocket of his silver suit. “It’s been so long that I’ve nearly forgotten, but- yes. I’ll show this to Lord Aiba. I think he’d want to see it.”

* * *

It’s always a Production, when the young god of spring steps onto the dirt again.

“Guess who’s back with spring in his steps?” Aiba laughs, twirling his way into Nino’s bar, a bouquet of daisies and sunflowers in his hands. He shoves the bouquet at Nino, who takes it with an indulgent smile, vase already waiting at his elbow.

“Look who’s back to bless us already,” Nino laughs, feeling light as he never does when spring and summer fades from the city. “How was the trip?”

Aiba makes a face. “My  _ husband _ decided to put a few more whistles and bells onto the train cars,” he grumbles. “It’s like he doesn't know how to leave a good thing alone!”

“Well, there’s no harm in a little improvement,” Nino hums, grinning at Aiba’s returning grimace. “Oh, don't look so sour, Masaki. You’re up top, remember? You’ll be here for six months, so might as well enjoy it while you can.”

Aiba brightens. “You’re right!” he grins, then spins to look at the dismal state of the bar. “Are we gonna be able to fit everyone in here tonight?” whenever spring rolls in, people tend to follow. Once the work day is over, Nino is sure that he’ll have more patrons in one night than he’s had in the last six months.

“Can we ever?” Nino replies easily. “It’s alright, just get them in for a drink, and they can spill out the back like they always do. You prefer it that way anyways, a better view of the sky.”

“You know me so well, little songbird,” Aiba says delightedly, smacking a kiss onto Nino’s cheek and leaving the air smelling crisply of petrichor and honeysuckle. It’s always a little strange to have someone who barely looks older than Nino himself calling him what Aiba does, but it’s a reminder of what he really is, how many Nino’s he’s seen in his life, passing through his realm and into his husband’s. Aiba closes his palm, and opens it to reveal a crimson carnation, tucking it behind Nino’s ear as if he could hear his thoughts. “We’re going to have a great time, you and I. And your young artist, too.”

“Ah, Sho showed it to you, then?”

“Brother, I haven’t seen anything like what your man has drawn in a long, long time,” his eyes grow distant, and something wistful softens the edges of his expression. “That boy has a gift, and if my husband is willing, I think the underworld needs a few pieces to remind us of times gone by.”

“So-” Nino begins, barely daring to hope.

“Get your lover over tonight, and we can talk. I ache for spring every time the winter months roll around, and it looks like your boy’s art is the closest I’ve got.” “Ladies and gentlepeople,” Sho says that night, climbing on top of one of the precariously teetering tables. “I give you: our lord of the spring, the husband of death himself, Lord Aiba!”

There are cheers and whoops from around the bar, packed to full capacity, and even more sounds of celebration from outside their doors. Aiba raises a clear glass bottle from his seat on the bar table, grin sparkling and bright enough to warm the entire room.

“Thanks for that introduction, Sho-chan!” he calls back. “Springtime is here, brothers and sisters!” he continues, to rapturous applause. “Masaki’s back in town, and I’m bringing the sunshine and the summer breeze with me, and I’m bringing y’all wine a-plenty to share. Let’s have  _ fun _ this summer, before my man comes and drags me six feet under again!”

With that, he hands the bottle over to Nino, who begins to fill the cups of the hungry residents. “So for now, let’s live it up!” he raises his glass, and the entire bar echoes him, the room bright with hope that only summer brings.

“Bet this is a lot nicer than your place down below,” Toma says, sidling up to the bar. Aiba beams at him, scattering dandelions on him with a snap of his fingers and laughing as people make sounds of awe.

“You have no idea, brother,” he says, grinning.

Meisa takes a full glass of dandelion wine from Nino, tilting her head towards their conversation and scoffing. “Who wants to work down  _ there _ , covered in sawdust and never seeing the sun?”

“You think I give a damn?” Aiba laughs and hands her a long iris. “It’s not my problem what poor suckers do in my husband’s city.”

He holds his cup out again, and Nino refills it obligingly. Another familiar man slides behind the counter, and Nino quirks a grin at Ohno, who’s smiling hopefully at him.

“You have something to add?” he asks teasingly, and Ohno shrugs a shoulder.

“Just wonderin’ if you’ll be singing a tune tonight, for luck, and the incoming spring,” Ohno replies cheekily. Nino swats at him as he fills another glass.

“Do I  _ look _ like I have time to sing?” he asks. Aiba looks over at them, eyes flashing as they catch Ohno’s profile.

“So you’re his artist,” he says, and Ohno bows in reply, gracefully if jokingly. When his head lifts again, it’s adorned by a circlet of flowers, glistening with dew. “You have quite the talent, little artist.”

Ohno smiles, small. “I have a good muse,” he replies.

Aiba nudges Nino. “You keep this one, brother, your man is quite the catch.”

“I haven’t caught anything,” Nino returns primly, smiling sweetly even as Ohno pouts. “It’s not my fault I’m so naturally irresistible.” 

“So  _ are  _ you going to sing a song?” Ohno asks him, a little more insistent. Nino gestures to the full bar.

“Much as I want to satisfy, I’ve got mouths to feed, and gold to collect. Unlike you, I can’t survive on artistic talent and imagination.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Aiba waves his hand, and more bottles appear on the table. “I’ll compensate you for everything tonight, so in exchange, let your boy have a song.”

At the sight of the new bottles, another cheer rises from the crowd. Aiba tilts his head to the ceiling, and poppies and hyacinths fall from the sky. People laugh in delight as they try to catch the flowers, and the younger children, holding cups of sparkling cider and sweet clementine wedges, squeal in delight as they abandon their cups to braid flowers in one another’s hair.

“Who says times are hard?” Aiba grins, red and purple petals dusting their way through his hair, where vines begin to twine their way through and bloom with the scent of jasmine and roses. 

Sho hops from table to table, the impression of wings on his shoes fitting as he lands, light as a feather, wherever he goes. He keeps dancing table to table until he reaches the bar beside Aiba, a handful of flowers in his hand, and takes a bottle to push it into Nino’s hands. “Let’s have a toast!” he announces, face slightly flushed from inebriation. As far as Nino could tell, gods didn’t  _ have _ to get drunk, but he’s never met one yet that hasn’t enjoyed the loose pleasure of light tipsyness.

“Let the artist have this round, then,” Aiba says. Ohno flushes a little, looking less than perfectly serene for the first time since Nino had met him.

“Oh, I’m not-” he begins, but Nino, grinning at his expression, pushes him lightly towards the bar, handing him a cup and filling it with clear liquor.

“I’m not singing until I hear a toast,” he announces, and Aiba and Sho laugh and pull Ohno onto the bar between them, until he’s standing clumsily in front of a crowd.

Ohno clutches the cup in front of him, and looks down at Nino. Nino smirks back, and strangely, that seems to untense his shoulders a little, until he can raise his cup to the crowd, watching as they fall silent to hear what the boy between two gods has to say.

“To the patron that brought us here- Mr. Masaki!” he calls, and Sho raises his cup with a cheerful hurrah. “To the sunshine, the fruit, the flowers that he brings with him every year,” Nino raises his own bottle at that, seeing many of his customers echoing his movement, eyes bright. “Asking for nothing in return but to be accepted as a fellow brother,” Aiba smiles. “And for us to live happily in the land he has provided. And so long as we raise our cups with him, he will always fill them with sweet wine and sweeter berries, and we will never be left wanting.” he hesitates for a moment, then folds his palms out. “Let’s clap for him, on three- one, two, and-” he gives a single clap, the sound echoing through the room. Nino blinks at him, a mirror of everyone else, before the room fills with snorts of laughter, the air bright with joy.

Nino raises his bottle as the noise dies down, watching the hope in everybody’s eyes, the way it is every summer. “To the world we live in now,” he says, and looks at Ohno. “And the one we dream about.”

* * *

And that is how the summer swept in, as Aiba danced and laughed his way across the city ( _ “I’m just getting started!” he laughs, as he raises his arms and watches the trees all go into bloom _ ), bringing vibrant greenery and ripe fruits wherever he passed. Nino’s bar became a hotspot again, the favored locale for the ever-popular god of spring and the constant stream of people that follow him. And every day and night people danced across the bright blue sky, faces filled with joy that they wouldn’t trade for all the gold in the world.

In Nino’s little corner of the world, Ohno takes his hands and twirls him out from behind the bar every day as the sun is high in the sky, pulls him into bright sunshine and crisp winds and tries to convince him to dance the day away, to sing another song. Nino laughs, sometimes pushing him away with coy eyes and sometimes letting himself be pulled away, leaving the worries of winter behind for a few hours as they hold each other close. 

Nino brings up Aiba’s request in one of these summer days, and Ohno looks at him like he honestly can’t understand what Nino is saying.

“I can’t sell those- none of them are done yet!”

Nino stares at him, sitting cross-legged in Ohno’s little alcove, gravel digging into the exposed flesh of his ankle as he watches his lover work. “What do you mean, they’re not done?” 

“None of these pieces are done,” Ohno repeats, serene. “None of them are quite  _ enough _ , yet.”

Nino looks at him, unimpressed. “I thought I was your muse, artist mine. Are you saying that I’m not enough to finish one painting?”

“The opposite,” Ohno tells him. “You’re too much- it’s hard to capture all of you. All of what I want.” He traces a finger over one of the pictures pinned on the walls of his small home, frowning. “I want to draw about love. About spring. I want to paint a love gone wrong, and a love healed.”

Nino looks at him. Sighs. “That’s very noble of you,” he says finally. “But sweet words aren’t enough to fill a stomach- neither is a pretty picture, for that matter. No matter  _ how _ pretty it is. Not on its own.”

“When I finish my picture, it will be,” Ohno promises.

“Lover, much as I admire your skills, you can’t actually pluck fruit from painted trees,” Nino leans down towards Ohno teasingly, spins away at the last moment, laughing at the look on his artist’s face. Ohno pouts at him, an expression that melts into affection like snow under the first touch of spring.

“Play a song for me, husband-to-be, and my paint will make summer come alive. Then you’ll have all the apples you desire.”

“Only apples?” Nino volleys back, but pulls out his guitar nonetheless. “Sounds like an unbalanced diet to me.” he strums a simple chord, then another. He begins to hum, and Ohno looks up at him with something like rapture.

“Almonds, too, then, and all the berries to stain your fingers and lips.”

Nino looks at him with half-lidded eyes, smile blooming on his face like a slowly unfurling flower, and plays a few more chords. “Well?” he asks as he strums, a little shy under the weight of Ohno’s regard. “Where are my fruits, old man? I was promised apples for my work.”

“You haven’t even sung yet!” Ohno laughs, and Nino grins back, warmer than the summer air around them.

“You haven’t requested anything yet,” he informs him. “What gives the great artist inspiration? A little folk song?” he plucks out the first few notes of a minstrel song, delighting in Ohno’s sound of joy. “The blues?” the strum changes to match his words. “A bit of jazz, perhaps?”

Ohno tilts his head, and answers without hesitation. “Anything,” he says. “So long as it’s a love song, and so long as you give it a happy ending.”

“A love song with a happy ending,” Nino repeats. “A little cliche, but doable.” and as his hands move on the guitar, notes filling the air and joined, a little later, by his clear, high voice, he sings of flowers, of fruit, and a boy who makes the world beautiful. And as he sings, as he watches the glide of Ohno’s brush across canvas, he can almost believe that his words are true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> songs i listened to while writing this chapter:
> 
> [come home with me](https://youtu.be/VUiCpGmi4dU)/[livin' it up on top](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_lZC55MI4)/[wedding song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9itu7pqhwY)
> 
> bonus: [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6balH7Zzew) the clip of the new york theatre workshop version of wedding song that inspired this entire fic, because i was like 'what if that bUT OHMIYA'


	2. 2//fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *flashes you a thumbs-up* this is where the angst tags start kicking in!!

As the months passed and the summer joy began to feel more like an indulgence than a given, a railway horn blares to life from a distance.

“Oh, come  _ on _ ,” Aiba shouts, hearing the echoes of the whistle from inside of Nino’s bar. In the corner, Ohno’s head raises slightly from his sketchbook.

Sho spins on his seat beside him, tilting his hat down slightly as hops off. “Guess it’s that time again.”

Aiba splutters. “But- that was  _ not  _ six months!” he complains. “I demand a refund.”

“Hey, it’s not me you have to talk to,” Sho points out. “Your husband’s the one ridin’ up.”

“Ugh, you’re no help,” Aiba grumbles, all but sliding out of his stool in reluctance. “How much time?”

“He’ll be here by nightfall, definitely,” Sho says, looking at his watch. 

Aiba groans again. “Probably timed that just to be dramatic, he’s so  _ like  _ that.”

Nino, from behind the bar, slows his wiping of bottles, feeling something familiar sink in the pit of his stomach.

“It’s...already time?” he asks, mind already miles ahead. Aiba gives him a sympathetic look.

“I’ll leave some of my bottles behind,” he says. “I’ve got new bottles fermenting in my cases anyways.”

Nino doesn't bother to tell him that all the wine in the world won’t help once the winter sets in and the hunger begins. As bright and fun and  _ human  _ Aiba seems, he’s still a god, and he’s never  _ quite _ understood the gnawing ache of hunger, or the bite of winter winds.

Instead, he watches Aiba roll his way around the bar, flicking his wrist to manifest a big silver suitcase and shoving it into Sho’s arms. “You get to carry this,” he informs him, aiming for sweetly poisonous but landing mostly on a grimace. Sho fumbles for a moment before getting his arms around the suitcase, laying it gently on the floor.

“What’s  _ in  _ this?” he asks. “How do you always bring an entire forest with you, at the end of every summer?”

Aiba gives him a look. “To put up with  _ that _ ?” he gestures to the ground. “Sho-chan, there isn’t enough wine in the  _ world _ for that.” he looks at Nino a little pleadingly. “I don't suppose you have any morphine?”

“I’m all out, unfortunately,” Nino replies wryly. Aiba sighs, a great, heaving sound.

“It’s like this every year!” he complains. “ _ ‘Six months,’ _ he says.  _ ‘I’ll give you all the time you need’ _ . And what does he do? Comes weeks before he’s due, every single time. And then has the gall to act like it’s  _ my  _ fault when I hold him to his promises! God knows what goes on in that man’s head, that he thinks he can just  _ take  _ everything he wants to.”

Nino thinks about the gold and jade around his neck, the fine clothes that always keep him warm.

_ “Wouldn’t be so bad, would it, to take instead of give for once,” _ a wind whispers in his ear, the voices that has come to him every year as the darkness begins to set in, ever since he was young. That’s how Nino knows that the chill is coming in, more so than the sight of Aiba beginning to pack his bags. Only the winter wind ever speaks to him like this, only they whisper truths to him that he isn’t sure he wants to - or is supposed to - know.  _ “To sip wine in fine furs all winter long, instead of scrounging for what little you have.” _

“Well, that’s why Hadestown has so much, isn't it,” he says, shaking off the chill. “Because Lord Matsumoto takes whatever he wants.”

Aiba looks at him with something like pity, as if Nino had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s what makes him a  _ tyrant _ ,” he says. And Ohno’s voice is soft in his agreement.

“All that work, for near to nothing in return,” he murmurs. “No sunshine or rain, just a few pieces of metal every day.”

“You have to admit he’s good at what he does,” Sho says. “All that gold and silver, to weigh against every soul.”

_ “Would your soul be worth enough for a coat for the winter?”  _ the winds ask Nino.  _ “Enough for fire through the dark nights? All those precious metals, all for the price of a life.” _

“A life for a life, gold for gold,” Nino hums, trying to drown out the whispering voices. “A king all alone on his chromium throne.”

Aiba barks out a deadpan laugh at that, picking up a bottle as he goes. He considers it for a moment, before pushing it into Sho’s arms, letting the other man put it in his seemingly infinite suitcase. “And every winter, it’s all the same. I’ll be up on that cold metal stone with him, bored to death until spring rolls around again. Nobody down there has any sense of humor- it’s absolute  _ hell _ , and not just in the literal sense.”

“Not much to laugh about,” Sho offers, and Aiba rolls his eyes.

“Maybe if my husband-”

“If I what?”

A shadow falls over the floor of the bar, and Nino turns as if he can't help but to do so, feeling everyone else turn with him as they look at the figure of the man they had all been talking about.

Aiba folds his arms over his chest. “You’re early.”

Lord Matsumoto tips up his head, eyes glinting like ice sheets, like fresh gravestones. “I missed you.”

In his presence, everyone moves as if they had been compelled into silence, a hush falling over every step and every turn. Silently, Lord Matsumoto takes Aiba’s fur jacket from Sho, placing over Aiba’s shoulders with the near-silent slide of silk on skin. Aiba takes the hand that he offers afterward, tilting his head at Ohno, then at Nino, in goodbye as he leaves with his husband, taking the summer warmth with him as he goes, leaving stale air in his wake.

As Lord Matsumoto leaves, Nino’s eyes sweep over him- the gleam of his leather shoes, the silken wool of his pants, the fine mesh of his jacket, the gold and silver that glimmers at his wrist, his throat. As he watches him go, he feels something almost like longing in his throat.

_ “He takes everything he wants _ , _ ”  _ Aiba’s voice echoes in his head as Lord Matsumoto shifts slightly. Their eyes meet for a second. The air is still. Then, he turns away again.

The thought flits across his mind, in Nino’s own voice. “ _ I wonder what that would be like. _ ”

And then they’re gone.

* * *

Every year, the whistle of the train leaving the station back to Hadestown signals the beginning of winter, and every year, it signals the beginning of an old, old fight. “It’s supposed to be  _ autumn _ ,” Aiba hisses, as the train pulls into their stop. Across from him sits Jun, infuriatingly implacable as ever, legs crossed as he observes him with sharp eyes. Aiba looks back at him steadily, centuries having worn away any semblance of shyness he might once have had in the face of his husband’s impenetrable expressions. He stands up as soon as the train grinds to a halt, the screech of metal his cue, and sweeps out of their room, letting his coat fall into the hands of an attendant, drawn and grey, as he goes. Jun follows him at a more sedate pace, handing off Aiba’s suitcase as he goes. Aiba continues as he walks, knowing that his voice will carry back to its recipient. “And it’s hotter than the height of summer down here. What do I have to look forward to, husband, that this is what greets me upon my return?”

Jun steps until they are side by side, and his voice is cool as he speaks. “I built a foundry, my love, in the time you were gone,” he says. “All these months without you, I needed something to occupy myself. I was lonely, waiting.”

Aiba scoffs. “So you built me more fire and steel?” he retorts. “More metal to destroy whatever nature is left down here, little as it is?”

“It’s all to make what you desire,” Jun returns, unshakeable. “Oil drums and automobiles, to trade for gold and silver to hang upon your throat.”

“I have enough of your little chains to bind around my neck,” Aiba says, quiet. Jun smiles, and Aiba remembers an echo of what he once felt when he saw it, a long time ago. 

“Husband, if you still long for the sky, I haven’t made the chains right,” he tells him, as if it were a simple fact. “All that heat and brimstone, all to keep you mine. Think of it like that, my love, and think of it as my desire.” he stops and turns to face Aiba, looking into his eyes, and lifts a pale hand and touches the edge of Aiba’s jaw, running his fingers down the planes of his face. Aiba doesn’t close his eyes, doesn’t lean into the touch, like winter chill, like marble.

“Think of it as my desire for you,” Jun says, and his voice leaves frost on Aiba’s eyelashes.

* * *

“Is it done yet?” Nino asks, watching Ohno sweep his brush over yet another canvas. His hands still on the guitar, cramped with both exhaustion and cold. His jaw sore from going through all the sweet and not-so-sweet songs he knows- once, twice, then another time.

Ohno shakes his head, the movement making a faint sound in the silence that follows. “No,” he says, barely aware. “Not yet.”

Nino breathes in. Out.

“Alright,” he murmurs, gently setting down his guitar as he stands up, walking back down the steps and back into his desolate bar. It’s November now, and the winds are growing colder. He looks around at the dark windows, the nights that drag on for longer and longer. The door creaks, and Nino turns to see Sho strolling in, looking around the place with sympathy on his face.

_ “Sympathy doesn't fill stomachs _ , _ ”  _ he hears, and he has to agree.

She walks up to the bar, knocks on it with fingers that haven’t been bitten by the cold. “Your man still working on his masterpiece?” he asks. Nino smiles wearily.

“It’s still ‘not quite right’,” he quotes, allowing only the faintest trace of bitterness thread through his voice. “He says he wants to create a piece of a love gone wrong. Of  _ them _ .” he jerks his head towards the ground, a little more resentment seeping into his voice, as it always does during winter.

Sho scoffs. “‘A love gone wrong’, alright,” he repeats. “Like any of us need any help remembering  _ that _ . Every  _ year _ , they have this fight.” he gestures to the wind outside, to the smoke seeping up from the direction the railroads lead. Nino’s eyes linger towards them for a second, then cuts back to Sho, who’s looking at him with something strangely knowing in his eyes.

“And while he’s collecting pebbles and paint, I’m collecting firewood and preserving fruit,” Nino tells him, pulling up another crate of empty jars from beneath the bar table. “Winter isn't going to pass us by, and all the pretty drawings he doesn’t sell won’t make for more than kindling for a flame.”

“Spring will be here soon enough,” Sho says, and the wind that runs through the cracks in the walls and chills Nino to the bone takes any consolation out from his words.

“Yes,” he agrees. “But before it does, I need to survive the winter winds. I need a shelter, a harbor-”

_ And I don’t know if my lover can provide. _

* * *

“It’s supposed to the darkest time of the year,” Aiba bites out, holding a hand to shield his eyes. “Why is it so  _ bright  _ down here?” the palace that they have shared ever since they were married is made of stone and steel, ornate furniture sparsely laid on the ground, beneath them is a floor of glass, flooding the rooms he comes back to every winter in stark, unforgiving white light. He looks towards Jun walking down their spiral steps, hand resting lightly on the banister, silk mahogany sleeves rolled to his elbows. “It’s brighter than the height of summer in here. Tell me, husband of mine, what I have to look forward to now, that this is what greets me in our home?”

Jun takes a step down, then another, his shoes echoing sharply in the silent spaces around them. “I wired a power grid beneath your feet, husband, while waiting for your return,” he says, steady as a metronome. “You were gone so long that my hands ached with loneliness, and I occupied them with wires to rid them of their longing for  _ you _ .”

Aiba glares at him, untouched, and turns to one of their windows, gesturing beyond the wide plane of glass towards the rest of the metal-and-stone city, all illuminated with the same harsh light. “So you did all of this for me?” he demands, voice like the sharpest thorns of a rose. “Neon lights and their unnatural shine? The workers already work all day and night, and this is how you repay them?”

“The dead don’t sleep, my love, so what does my light do but illuminate their work?” Jun replies easily, slipping down the rest of the steps and moving towards Aiba. Aiba takes a step away, and takes satisfaction in the flash of fury in Jun’s eyes. “No, these lights are for you and you alone, a light brighter than the sun you so crave. A cathode ray for the underworld, all to keep you within my gaze.”

“I have spent centuries under your glare,” Aiba retorts. “All your gleaming stones, your metal-forged fire. There’s no joy in being lit by light reflected in a cage.”

Jun takes another step forward, and Aiba takes another step back. They’ve danced this dance for decades, centuries, millennia, and Aiba remembers as he moves the echoes of a different dance. Jun’s eyes burn into him as he keeps moving forward, until Aiba is pressed against the cool glass of the window. When he speaks, he looks like a shadow over the sun, and his voice is the ash left after a forest fire.

“Husband, if you can’t find joy in these lights, that only means that I need more wire, more diamonds, more steel. More time to make our world just right,” he looks past him into Hadestown, into the city he built with his own two hands and thousands of lost souls, freely and not-so-freely given. “All that lightning and wire to keep us bound. Look at it like that, my love, and see the glare as my despair.” he holds out a hand, and Aiba looks at it, looks at the city reflected in the glass, and turns away. Jun grabs his wrist before he can go, and his fingers are pale and strong as steel cuffs where they curl around the bronze of Aiba’s skin. Aiba looks back at him, remembering grass under his feet and those fingers like silk draped over his palm, and mourns.

“Think of it as my despair for you,” Jun whispers, and lets go, letting Aiba walk away from the echoing silence that remains.

* * *

“Is it done yet?” Nino asks, throat hoarse and fingers chapped, guitar still on his lap as he watches Ohno press glass and stone upon yet another blank sheet. Another garden, another day. The wind shakes the room around them, filled with beauty that means nothing, now.

Ohno shakes his head. “No,” he replies, voice soft and almost hypnotised. “Not yet.”

Nino stares at him bleakly, swallowing the scream that wants to escape.

“Hurry,” he whispers, and turns his back to his artist.

The bar is even more desolate, the shelves bare, the windows cracked with frost and wind. He ducks under the bar, knowing with a bone-deep resignation that there’s nothing left there, either. No food, no firewood, no matches.

When he stands back up, Sho is at the bar, looking at him with desolate eyes.

_ “Grief for the ephemerality of man won’t keep you through the winter,”  _ the winds laugh in his ear, and he sighs in agreement, too tired to do otherwise.

Sho approaches him, silver suit and wing-tipped shoes unweathered by the storm around them, and Nino feels a familiar rage in the pit of his stomach where his hunger and cold congeal. The god smiles at him, as if reading his thoughts. “Your artist still working on his  _ love gone wrong _ ?” he asks.

Nino stares at him with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, fingers frostbitten by the cold. “It’s not ready,” he murmurs. “It’s never ready. Their love with never stop hurting us,” he looks out the window, at the wind and the sheets of snow. “And his work will never be done.”

“When the gods are having a fight, nobody comes out unscathed,” Sho hums. “Least of all, the humans.”

Nino huffs out something that, in another life, might have been a laugh. “While they fight, and while my lover collects his pebbles and draws his brush, I’ve used up the last of my gold.” He looks down at his palm, remembering dancing in the summertime, leaving the worries of winter behind, and incandescently furious with his past self. “There’s barely anything left, now. I don’t understand how he’s still like this.” he looks upward, towards the place where his lover works. “But somebody has to keep us alive. He may live in his pretty paintings, but somebody has to provide. Somebody has to light the fires.”

“Spring will dawn again, it always does,” Sho tells him, and Nino would throw something at him, if he had the strength.

“Before or after I wither away?” he asks. It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation, but it’s the first time in a long time that he feels the true bleakness of it all. The true cruelty that Ohno subjected him to wasn’t the job of providing for two, but instead the audacity to give him hope, so that winter is even crueler when it takes it away. “I was stupid, I see it now. All the pretty colors on his page, the beauty of his mind- none of it can harbor me, harbor us, from the whims of gods.”

He coughs out a small laugh, shaking his head at the look on Sho’s face. “Don’t look like that, Lord Sakurai,” he says, deliberately flippant. “What do you care about the trivialities of a human life or two?”

Sho sighs, and looks out the window. “I wish I could do something for you, songbird,” he murmurs, and Nino shrugs.

“You weren’t the one who promised to.”

* * *

Aiba is sitting on the balcony when Jun finds him, a bottle in his hands and boots swinging over the railing, looking down at the factories below.

“Every year, it’s more of the same,” he says, not turning around as Jun moves closer. “You know what they call Hadestown up top?  _ ‘Hell on earth’ _ ,” he laughs without humor. “Get it? Because it’s not just your realm you’re changing anymore, it’s the world above.  _ My _ world.”

Jun comes to the railing beside him, laying his hands on the smooth granite and surveying his kingdom below. “Everything I do,” he says, words carrying through the smog and ash. “I do it all for you, my love.”

Aiba whips his head around to face him, eyes flashing from sage to jade, the same color as the stone that Jun had hung around his throat on their first anniversary, the stones he carved into the walls of the home that his husband refuses to live in.

“Did you think I’d be  _ impressed _ ?” he asks, cruel and incredulous. “With something like  _ this _ \- a world of smoke and metal and wire, a neon necropolis?” at whatever he sees in Jun’s face, his voice lowers, almost tender, and somehow it stings him more than any fury could. 

“All I wanted,” his husband says, in that soft, infuriating tone. “Was to be happy. We  _ were _ happy, once, remember? Back in that garden, where we met, back when nothing was between us.” he closes his eyes, and Jun does too, allowing himself this one weakness, the memory of flowers pressed into his palms, sun-warmed hands between his. Seeds.

It takes the span of a breath that isn’t, and then he’s looking at what he’s made instead, and his husband’s voice is the cold one he knows, instead of the softness he still sometimes dreams about.

“But that was before all of  _ this _ -” Aiba gestures towards his city, contempt in every inch of his body. “All your lights and electricity, your ever-expanding factories. Back before you built the wall, and carved around me a cage of gold.” his voice cuts off, like he’s in pain, and it fills Jun with familiar, helpless rage. “It isn't right,” he says, finally. “It’s not natural.”

Jun closes his fists on the balcony. Opens them.

“If that’s what you wish, husband,” he says, after the silence stretches taut between them. “To fly beyond the walls, to not to have my love around your throat, then I can find somebody who does.” he watches the lines of Aiba’s face, and purses his lips when he finds them unchanged. He looks away again, down at his factories. His people. “There are people,” he continues. “Who are more...appreciative, of the comforts afforded in a gilded cage. Who don’t try to fly from their walls every spring, at the first call of their mother’s voice.” his voice rises despite himself, hail instead of frost. “There are people who can love these walls, for what it gives, rather than what it gives away, and think of them the way they are. Think of them as my embrace.”

When he looks back at his husband, Aiba is looking back, something like pity in his face. It curdles at the back of Jun’s throat, sour and bitter like rotten fruit.

“There may be,” his husband agrees sadly, worn boots hitting their balcony floor with the lightest sound as he hops down. “Oh, my love, there will always be people looking for a place to land, but don’t mistake their weariness for true affection, their gratitude for understanding.”

He touches light fingers to Jun’s cheekbones, brief and uncaring of the light frost that spreads at his touch. Jun closes his eyes, tries to keep the warmth impressions as long as he can. When he opens his eyes again, his lover is gone.

* * *

The first thing that Nino notices is the frost.

It isn’t uncommon, for the floors and window panes to frost over during the winter, but the frost he finds at the edges of the bar doors that day curl in strange, beautiful designs. They are strangely smooth to the touch, and untouched by the scalding water Nino boils to clear it.

Then, he sees the shoes. Black leather, shiny and new, the way that only gods can afford to wear.

_ Sho _ , he thinks, before his eyes rise, before he sees the snow-white skin and slate-grey eyes. His blinks- once, twice, but he’s still staring at the lord of death, the master of Hadestown.

“Lord Matsumoto,” he says, voice hushed instinctively. The lord tilts his head at him, a predator assessing prey.

“You are the songbird my husband likes to talk about,” he says, finally. “The little barkeep that houses my lover’s spirits.”

“I- yes?” Nino isn't quite sure what’s happening, why Lord Matsumoto is  _ here _ , up top, instead of in his domain. Why he’s in front of Nino, of all people.

“Sing a song for me, then,” the lord says, and Nino is so startled he can only stare.

“Excuse me?” he asks, once he’s recovered, and wonders vaguely why so many people had such a vested interest in his casual hobby.

“A song, songbird,” Lord Matsumoto repeats, sounding impatient. “And make it quick. I’m a busy man, as you’re well aware.”

“A...song,” Nino repeats, then: “I, I don’t have my guitar on me, right now.”

Lord Matsumoto waves a hand idly, and there is a sleek black guitar in his hand. He holds it towards Nino, who takes it in ginger fingers, marvelling at the intricate craftsmanship of it all, the cold that emanates from it. Carefully cradling it in his arms, he strums out a note. Another. He hums a simple melody, and then opens his mouth and begins to sing. It’s a simple song, a sad song, full of longing, and his voice is hoarse and weak, but Lord Matsumoto is still peering at him as he finishes. Nino waits, forcing down the tremor in his hands.

“Such a pity,” the lord says, finally, “For someone with your talent, so pretty and young, to have their wings clipped by poverty, and left in the cold. Tell me, songbird, what’s keeping you grounded? What is it that you most desire?”

There’s something in the cadence of his voice that draws Nino closer, the steady beat of it, perhaps, or the utter surety. “I want,” he finds himself confessing. “A warm place to land. Somewhere soft, where I can stay, just for a while. Somewhere where there’s enough.”

The lord’s lips curve slightly. “Ah, I may be able to help, if that’s what you need,” he says, still in that low, steady timbre. “A warm landing, no more hunger, or cold. It’s not a bad deal, for someone in your shoes, someone who has nothing more to lose.”

“I-” Nino begins. Stops. He knows what the lord is offering, how could he not? “I can’t. There’s someone- he would never go down, and I told him I’d stay.”

Lord Matsumoto’s eyebrow quirks. “A vow?” he says, something like laughter in his voice. Not the laughter that Nino is familiar with, the warm cadence of Aiba’s babbling giggles or the familiar, beloved comfort of Ohno’s snuffling laugh. This sound is more like the echoes of an organ in an empty church, the chime of a bell tower over an abandoned city. Nino shivers, and for once it isn’t from the cold. “What a shame, for that to stop you now. You have quite a lot of talent, and I could use a canary in my mine.”

He sweeps his gaze over Nino, then over his bar, over the attic where Ohno keeps his paintings. “Let me guess,” he says, dry humor in his voice. “He’s an artist, and he’s, hm, penniless?” at Nino’s silence, his smile widens. “What has he offered you, then, freedom to starve? A pretty sketch to use as kindling in the cold?” he lets the tension between them stretch, then continues. “Why hold out for spring, when you can fly south for the winter?”

He holds out his hand, and Nino holds out the guitar. Matsumoto takes it, and it melts into a flurry under his fingertips. He takes Nino’s wrist with one hand, and Nino shivers at the frost that dances over his skin. His hand is opened, and something cool and round is pressed to his palm, the lord using his other hand to curl Nino’s fingers over it.

“What is it?” Nino asks. Whispers, really. He looks down at his palm, at the gold coin in his hand, emblazoned with the outline of a poppy, bricks behind it, and then back up to the man who pressed it into his hand.

“A ticket,” Matsumoto says, voice like the silence after the boom of lightning, like a freshly turned grave. “A chance.”

He slips away, and Nino presses the cool metal deeper into his palm. Wonders.

* * *

Sho doesn’t look surprised, when Nino shows him the coin.

“Songbird and rattlesnake,” he murmurs. “It was bound to happen at some point.”

Nino raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me what this is, or are you going to keep talking in metaphors?”

“Like Lord Matsumoto said,” Sho tells him. “It’s a ticket. A ticket to Hadestown.”

“And why would the lord of the dead give  _ me  _ a ticket?” Nino asks. Sho smiles at him.

“Some people...need things,” he says. “And Lord Matsumoto knows that. He knows what he can give to them, and so he asks, and gives them a chance. He probably heard about you from Lord Masaki, and got curious.”

Nino considers this, reluctantly accepting it. “I suppose.” he hesitates. “Do you think I should go?”

Sho is already shaking his head. “I can't interfere with this,” he tells him. “As much as I want to, as a friend, this is out of my domain now.”

“I just want to know what it’s like down there!” Nino insists, but Sho continues to stay silent. Nino sighs. “I just- all these winters, wondering if I’m going to starve to death, wondering if I’m going to  _ freeze  _ to death, and now- this.”

Sho looks at him levelly. “Does your artist know?”

Nino laughs bitterly. “What do you think?” he retorts. “He’d never let me go, and he’d never go with me, either.” he closes his eyes for a moment, pained. “If I go, I’m betraying him.”

Sho places a hand on his shoulder, the pressure strangely human next to the sun-warmth of Aiba and the frost of Matsumoto. “Whatever choice you make,” he says, strangely intent. “Remember that it  _ is _ a choice. There’s always a choice.”

Before Nino can demand to know what he means, the god is nothing more than a gust of wind.

“You-  _ vague bastard _ ,” he hisses, annoyed.

_ “It’s not a difficult decision, little songbird,” _ the wind hums to him, picking up speed. Nino stares, uncomprehending, as they resolve themselves into three women, all wearing the same beautiful grey gowns.

“You’re,” he says. “You’re real. You’re  _ people. _ ” he pauses. “People-shaped.”

They laugh in tandem. “Sweet singer, did you think we were not?” one asks. “You, of all people, should know that the intangible doesn't mean the unreal.”

“But I’ve been hearing you since I was a child,” Nino protests. “I thought- it seemed like it was just me.”

The middle woman shrugs. “We like interesting people,” she says. “And you’re meant for  _ such _ an interesting fate, we couldn’t help but follow you, a little.”

The realization dawns on Nino, slow and surreal. “You’re the fates,” he says.

“Clever,” the left woman praises. “Men have been known to call me Clotho. My sisters are Lachesis and Atropos. But of course, those are human names. It is more fitting to call us as we are, as an inevitability.”

“Inevitable,” Nino murmurs to himself. “What’s inevitable?”

“More than you would think,” laughs Lachesis. “There is little that  _ isn't  _ inevitable. Not to us.”

“And why are you here  _ now _ ?” Nino asks, though he has a feeling he already knows. His eyes glance over the coin in his hand.

“That’s right,” Clotho says. “We’re here to help you make a choice.”

“The right choice?” Nino shoots back, and the three women laugh again, their voices holding whispers that Nino can't quite make out.

“Oh, young man,” Atropos’ lips curve into a scarlet slash. “There is no right choice, there is only  _ a _ choice.”

“And you know what that choice must be,” Lachesis slides around him until she’s standing at the periphery of his vision. “After all, what happened the last time you tried to choose anyone but yourself?”

“Hunger.” Clotho moves to his other side, so that the three women are circling him.

“Cold.”

“There’s no safe harbor in the arms of your lover,” Atropo laughs. Nino takes a step back, and shivers at the chill of wind that runs through him.

“That’s not true,” he whispers, sounding unconvinced even to himself. “He said-”

“He said what, that he would make the winter into spring?” Lachesis scoffs. “Look around, little songbird, there’s no sunlight to be found!”

“No fruit to lay at your table.”

“No coat to shield you from the wind.”

“Spring is a long time away,” Clotho croons. “And so it shall be, every year hence, until the gods themselves wither.”

“You know better than anyone else, the dangers of winter,” Atropo tells him. “You know that there’s only one way to get some reprieve.”

“Help yourself.”

“To hell with the rest!”

“Even the people who love you,” Lachesis’ eyes sweep across the attic, and Nino wonders momentarily how Ohno hasn’t come down yet. Why he isn’t here to dissuade Nino from going. Surely he must’ve heard Nino’s song. Surely he could hear the grief in his voice every time he spoke. She moves towards him, laying a hand on his chest. It doesn’t feel like anything, the barest pressure of a breeze.

“If you don’t hand that ticket in,” she says. “Someone else will. Will you be able to live with that, singer?”

“The first shall be first,” Atropos declares.

Clotho moves forward as well, caging him tighter between them. “And the last shall be last.”

“There’s no righteousness, no justice, no innocence. Not now that winter is in town.”

Lachesis moves then, leaning close and whispering in his ear before shoving Nino backwards. He stumbles, back hitting the counter.

“Nino?” he looks up, and Ohno is standing at the staircase, face smudged with charcoal and drawn with concern. “I heard you fall.”

“I’m- I’m fine,” Nino says, even as he looks around at the now-empty bar. The women in grey long gone, but their last words linger in his mind like a brand.

_ “Let’s see what choice you’re going to make, little songbird, now that the chips are down.” _

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a railroad track.

“You got your ticket?”

And standing at the gate is a young boy with a golden coin.

“Yeah.”

The boy gives the coin to the conductor, who gives him a pen.

“You need to sign these papers, and then I’ll take you down.”

He looks back to the home that he’s leaving, and then to the promised land he’s going towards. He signs the papers.

“I’m gone,” he says into the wind, a message to a lover still asleep in their bed, and steps into the train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> songs from this chapter:
> 
> [way down hadestown](https://youtu.be/nJIc3RtJK7U)/[chant i](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffyJGdCsdYA)/[hey, little songbird](https://youtu.be/hRGQqFfqps0)/[when the chips are down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu4AhyJL_U4)/[gone, i'm gone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhuyQfLXARs)


	3. 3//winter

“Kazu?”

Sho looks up as Ohno walks down the stairs, looking around for his missing lover. Nino not being in bed when he woke wasn't uncommon, these days, but it wasn't like him to be gone for so long.

“Ah, the young artist!” Sho greets him, grinning. “Still working on that masterpiece?”

“It’s not done yet,” Ohno says vaguely, still looking fruitlessly around the bar. “Sorry- Lord Sakurai-”

“Call me Sho! Someone around here has to, after all.”

Ohno hesitates. “...Sho,” he says. “Have you seen Ka- Nino around here? He’s been gone for a few days now, and it’s not like him to stay away.”

“Isn’t it,” Sho looks amused, like Ohno made some joke that only he understands. He spins in his seat to face Ohno. “I have to ask, Ohno-kun, why do you care? There are plenty of muses out there for a starving artist to use.”

Ohno gapes in response, stunned at the words coming out of Sho’s mouth. “Where is he?” he asks again, because he doesn’t know what else to say without lashing out foolishly against a god, and because he somehow knows that Sho is perfectly aware of where Nino has gone.

“Why are you so desperate to know?”

“Because we’re supposed to be together,” Ohno says, frustrated. “Wherever he is, is where I’m meant to go.”

Sho stares at him for a moment, assessing, then asks. “What if I told you he was down below?”

“Down below?”

“Where all mortals go- six feet under,” Sho reiterates. “Down below, where the railways lie.”

“I don’t understand,” Ohno says, and he feels like he’s speaking from very far away.

Sho shrugs. “I said what I said, young artist. Your boy took the last train to Hadestown- he called for you before he stepped in, but I suppose you were too busy painting to hear him.”

“No,” Ohno chokes out, horror curling its fingers around his throat. Then, louder. “He can’t be!”

“He is,” Sho replies. “Your boy was a hungry young man, and Lord Matsumoto took him down into his city. Now, well- he’s not gonna be hungry anymore.” he looks at the bare shelves of the bar, the empty tables. “What he will be, is dead.”

Ohno shakes his head, unable to conceptualize Nino- fierce, unbreakable Nino, being lost to him by something as banal as death. “He can’t be,” he repeats, and Sho looks at him more intently.

“And what are you gonna do about it if he is?” he asks, a challenge in his voice.

Ohno straightens his back, looks the god in the eyes. “Go get him back.”

“And how far would you go, for your little songbird?”

“To the end of time,” he says, sure from his bones. “To the end of the earth.”

Sho raises an eyebrow. “A touching sentiment, to be sure,” he says lightly. “But before you go frolicking off the edge of the earth, I have to ask- you got a ticket?”

Ohno opens his mouth. Closes it. “...No?”

Sho laughs. “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” he considers Ohno for a moment. “Of course, there is _that_ way...”

“There’s a way?” Ohno demands, stepping forward. Sho holds up his hands, placating.

“It ain't for me to say, brother,” he tells him. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”

“Sho-” Ohno struggles for a moment before continuing. “It’s _Nino_.”

Sho nods. “I know,” he says. “And god knows I owe that young singer a favor or a dozen, which is the only reason I’m even considering it.”

“What _is_ it?” Ohno asks, furious with fear. Sho tilts his head at him.

“It’s not for the sensitive of souls, this particular path,” he warns. “It’s around the back, the long way down. Are you _sure_ you wanna go?”

Ohno doesn't have to think about it. “With all my heart.”

Sho snorts. “With all your heart, huh,” he repeats, ironic. “Well- I suppose that’s a start.”

* * *

Hadestown is bright in a way that Nino doesn’t recognise, when he steps out from the train. Bright from glaring neon lights, reflecting off of steel beams and gold buildings.

“We’re free,” he tells himself, looking at the precious stones surrounding him, the metal walls that stretch to the dirt-packed sky, and thinks that the tremble in his voice is excitement.

“We’re free, alright,” a broad woman in worker’s clothes and a hard hat pulls him harshly away from the platform, interrupting his gaze, and shoves a pile of clothing into his arms. When he looks down, they’re the same uniform that she’s wearing. “Free to work our lives away, free to be Lord Matsumoto’s slaves, toiling in Hadestown until the end of time.”

Nino blinks. Laughs. “You don’t understand,” he says. “It’s different, with me.”

The woman laughs too, sharp and humorless. “Different than _who_?” she asks. “Young man, I thought I was different too. We all did. Let me guess, Mr. Matsumoto gave you a coin, said you would be a diamond down in his mines. That’s all of us, brother.”

“This isn’t right,” Nino shakes his head. “This can't be right. This was supposed to be a promised land.”

He’s given no reply from the woman, just tugged along through workers all drilling and mining into the ground, covered in sweat and ash, faces twisted.

 _“We gave you a choice,”_ the winds hiss in his ear. _“And we said you’d get your due. The steady beat of Hadestown is_ all _we promised you.”_

They arrive at the mouth of a cavern, lit by spots of headlights from the inside. He’s given a push.

“There’s no time to rest your weary head,” the woman tells him. “You’ve been given everlasting life, and everlasting overtime. There’s always work to do, down in Hadestown.”

Nino doesn’t remember putting on his uniform, doesn’t remember picking up a pickaxe and cart, but he starts to work, nonetheless.

There’s nothing else to do, after all, for a soul that now belongs in the ground.

* * *

_“If you wanna get to Hadestown, you’re gonna have to follow the railroad track. Keep your head down, keep out of sight, the conductor is watching for strays, and he won't be kind if he finds you.”_

Ohno clutches his sketchbook in his hand as he walks, careful to keep the tracks within his sight while staying out of the gaze of the conductor. He watches as the dirt hardens as the road goes on, going from soil to gravel to pavement. He thinks about the spring, about a love eroded by time and rust, and pulls out his charcoal.

* * *

Nino is nothing if not a fast worker, and Lord Matsumoto is right- he _does_ shine down in the mines. 

If that shine is from diamond dust reflecting helmet lights, and if his fingers begin to crack and peel from peeling jewels from the cavern walls for the lord husband’s throat- well, it wasn’t as if he hadn't been warned.

* * *

_“You know you’re on the right path when you hear the howl of the hellhounds, so prepare your bait and prepare to run. If those hounds catch the back of your legs- well, soon you won’t have to worry about your ticket.”_

Ohno hears the growl of the hounds in the distance, and he begins to run. He trips, stumbles, spills onto the concrete pavement, and he thinks for a moment that he’s lost-

But when he looks back, he sees the three headed beasts, and they are curled on the ground, and they are asleep, and when he looks down he sees the patch of grass beneath them. The sketchbook he’d dropped in his fall lying open innocently beside them.

He picks the book up, and remembers drawing the scene in front of him. Nino had been singing a lullaby, and he had felt his hands slow, and he had drawn a place he’d thought would be nice to rest his head upon.

 _“Take that with you, young artist,”_ Sho had said, gesturing to his book as he left. _“You have a gift, and it just might get you down alive.”_

“Oh,” he says, and keeps on walking.

* * *

Sometimes his mouth begins to hum, songs that he doesn’t have the breath to sing anymore. Sometimes he hears a voice that he doesn’t know, asking him to go back to a home he doesn’t have anymore. Sometimes he pauses - just for a moment, just for a beat in the rhythm of machinery - and almost remembers the taste of something sweet on his lips. 

Sometimes he sees green out of the corner of his eye, and aches.

* * *

Ohno stares up at the wall above him, iron binding smooth steel and razor wire. There’s no possible way to climb it. At least, not through conventional means.

 _“The road in front of you is long and almost impossible,”_ Sho had left saying, giving him a hand on his shoulder and a solemn look on his face. _“But whatever you do, don't look back.”_

He thinks of Nino, who had only ever wanted shelter from the wind, warmth in the cold, food to sustain him, and sits before the structure. Pulls out his sketchbook. Begins to draw.

* * *

He sees a man, once in a while. The lord husband, and he looks at him with desperately sad eyes.

“Oh, _Nino_ ,” he whispers, and he barely registers what that means - that it’s his name. “I never- I would’ve warned you better, if I’d known.”

His voice cracks when he speaks, dusty with disuse. “You didn’t,” he says, and hurries to bury his pickaxe in the wall again before anyone can notice his lapse.

The lord husband sighs, puts a hand on Nino’s arm, and the warmth is so strange, so nostalgic, that Nino wishes for a moment that he still had tears to cry.

“Come with me for a moment, songbird,” Aiba asks of him, pulling him gently away from his work. Nobody dares to question his will as they leave. “I miss your voice, and I miss companionship. They won't miss you down here for too long.”

His voice makes Nino think, strangely, of flowers. He remembers flowers, and he remembers soft dirt beneath his feet, and someone who turned to him and took his hands. He remembers pulling away.

His dreams were sweet, up there, he remembers, until they weren’t. Men were kind, up there, until they stopped.

Flowers bloomed, he thinks. Until they rot, and fall apart.

* * *

For a moment, Ohno wonders if he will be able to find him in the crowd of workers, all wearing the same grime-covered clothing, the same hard hats. Under the same clang of machinery and bright flash of neon lights that burns his eyes and dries his throat. Then he catches a glimpse of a hand raising a pickaxe, so familiar it felt like a punch, and almost breaks down in laughter, in relief. 

How could he have ever had any doubt of finding his lover, his muse, when he could hear his voice, trace the exact shape of him, in any space, through any length of wire and mortar? He pushes his way forward, slipping through the throng of workers with the grace of a dancer, until he’s behind the man he came for.

“Come home with me,” he says, declares, and watches Nino’s face transform as he turns around. For a moment, there’s nothing in his eyes, no recognition nor life, and Ohno is almost terrified, and then something changes, and his face becomes familiar and dear again.

“Satoshi?”

“Yes,” he reaches out his hands, and Nino flinches away, a flash of fear in his eyes, before slowly, carefully, touching them with his fingertips. He waits a moment, as if expecting Ohno to fade away, and his voice tremors when he doesn't, sliding their palms together.

“It’s really you,” he whispers, wondering.

“It’s really me,” Ohno confirms, stepping forward so that there is only the barest breath separating them. “Come home with me, Kazu. I won’t leave, not without you.”

Nino shakes his head, disbelieving. “How...how the hell did you get here? On the train, with a ticket?” his face hardens, eyes flashing with anger, breathtakingly _alive_ beneath the dust of the city, and Ohno loves, loves, loves this man. “Did Sho give you one?”

“He didn’t,” Ohno tells him, a hint of something mischievous in his expression. “I walked.”

“You-” Nino struggles for a moment, something like laughter in his voice, more incredulous than joyful. “You walked.”

“I walked,” Ohno repeats. “I walked and I walked and I drew what I saw, all along the railway line.”

“But how- how did you get past the wall?”

Ohno smiles, leans in like he’s telling a secret. “I drew a picture,” he says. “And I made it breathe, and it was so beautiful that the stones turned into roots and branches and carried me in.” he leans back, smiling at Nino’s wide eyes. “And I can sing us back home again.”

“No you can’t,” Nino’s voice is sharp, and his eyes are hungry where they scan over Ohno. Ohno looks back serenely into those eyes, still as bright as the day he first saw him, and he doesn’t have a doubt in his mind.

“Yes I can.”

Nino laughs wetly. “Are you always like this? So sure of yourself?”

“Always, if it’s you. You make me sure of everything,” Ohno returns, falling into the rhythm of his favorite song. Their song.

“I can’t see why you’re chasing so hard after me,” Nino admits. “I’m just a worker now, down in Hadestown. I don’t even sing anymore, not down here.”

“You’re amazing,” Ohno tells him. He thinks that he could spend the rest of his breaths telling Nino that, and still not have it be enough. “Your voice is the most beautiful thing in the world, singing or not. And you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. You’re the man who’s going to become my husband.”

Nino stares at him. “Why are you getting on your knees?” he says, voice faint. Ohno grins at him, lopsided and easy, as if the skies above them were blue and vast instead of silver steel.

“I want you to be my husband,” Ohno replies. “Marry me, take my hand. Say ‘I do’. Let our song have a happy end.”

“I...”

“Kazu, please.”

 _“Oh, dear naive artist,”_ croons the voice in a passing wind, taking away Nino’s answer. _“Don’t you understand? It’s far too late for that!”_

Ohno spins around as Nino’s hands clench where they’re holding his. “Who-”

“I can’t,” Nino says, louder. He looks at their hands together, then lets go. Ohno feels his hands falling to his sides, but he can’t move from his place on the ground. The beat before his next words sound vast, somehow. Empty. “Don’t you understand, Satoshi? We don’t _have_ a song, not anymore. I don’t have lungs to sing it, even if I wanted to. No breath to give you music, no melody to be your muse. Maybe it could’ve been different, if the world is how you always said it was. But it _isn’t_. Not for us.” his voice sharpens with anger, raises, words spilling out faster, like they’re replacement for tears that he can no longer shed. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the world, lover, but I have. And it doesn’t change, and it isn’t beautiful. No matter how much we want it to be.”

 _“He’s right, you know,”_ the winds croon again, an unsettling harmony. _“Your little birdie has found a new nest, and his new owner isn’t nearly so lenient.”_ they laugh. _“He’s already made a deal with Lord Matsumoto, and the lord takes his deals very seriously. He belongs to Hadestown, now.”_

Ohno stills. Stares at Nino’s form, his eyes cast to the ground.

“That can’t be true,” he whispers, almost inaudible over the sound of machinery. 

_“Oh, it is,”_ the fates laugh, high and mocking. _“He is.”_

“You can’t belong to him,” he insists, looking at the dust covering Nino’s face.

 _“He does,”_ they repeat.

“You _can’t_.” a last plea.

Nino looks up at him at last, meeting his eyes.

“I do.”

* * *

“You have to go,” Nino tells him, hollowed-out, and Ohno shakes his head.

“I came all this way,” he tells him. “I’m not leaving without you.”

“Young man, you might not leave at all.”

Ohno sees Nino freeze, sees his eyes move behind him, and turns to see the master of the city looking down at him.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” the lord says, voice low but cutting through the noises surrounding them without effort. “But I’m the master of this city, and I can tell you don’t belong. I don’t care what you’re doing here, artist, but around you are hard-working citizens, here on their fares. There’s no place for trespassers here.”

The workers around them don't raise their heads, don't make any movement to indicate that they’ve even noticed their lord standing in their midst, but Ohno can tell they’re listening. That they’re waiting. He looks Matsumoto in the eye, a poor young man in front of a god, and raises his voice, trembling. “I’m not going back alone. I came to take my husband home.”

“Husband?” Matsumoto laughs, colder than a December storm, and begins to walk towards him. “I don’t see any papers, boy, nor any rings upon your hands. Tell me, do you really think that you can make any dream real if you talk of it long enough?”

He pushes Ohno backwards, into the gravel, and Ohno can hear Nino’s choked cry, feel death-chilled hands on his shoulders.

“I’m going to be lenient, for a first time offence,” the lord tells him, tells everyone around him. “I’ll give you ten minutes to run, before I set my hounds on you.” Ohno hears Nino begin to protest, but Matsumoto’s voice rises above his. “Let this be a reminder that everything in Hadestown is _mine_ , and trespassers-” his eyes shine like the precious metals he collects, and his voice rises to a crescendo. “Will _not_ be tolerated.”

* * *

Nino begins to lift him as soon as the lord begins to walk away. “We need to get you out of here. _Now_.”

“I’m not leaving,” Ohno says, keeps saying, refuses to stop saying. “Not without you.”

“And I _can’t go_ ,” Nino repeats. “Satoshi, _I can’t leave,_ not even if I wanted to.”

Ohno shakes his head, touches Nino’s face with such a tender, _alive_ hand that Nino stills, breath that he does not have knocked out of his lungs. “That’s not what I meant,” his dear, stupid lover says. “Sing me a song, lover.”

Nino stares at him. “What?”

“Give me one last song, if I’m never going to see you again.”

“Satoshi, we don’t have _time_ -”

“Time is all we have left, sweetheart, and I want to spend it with you,” Ohno quirks a smile. “You promised me a song, remember?”

Nino looks down at him, and remembers.

“And you promised that the world would be generous,” he murmurs. “And I believed you.”

“Believe me again,” Ohno says. “One last time.”

* * *

Everybody knows that walls have ears, and the workers of Hadestown heard the song of the trapped canary, and looked towards him and his lover. And as he sang, a wind ran through the city like it had never done before, and the artist lifted his hands and let the pages of his sketchbook scatter across the metal land.

Sheets and sheets of paper fell to the ground, all across a land that had once known and has long forgotten life. And people stopped in their tracks and stared at the pages, remembering things they had never dared to remember before.

“There was grass, once,” one said, picking up a page with reverent hands.

“I remember sunlight,” whispers another, as he soaks in the warmth of watercolor rays.

“We laughed, before,” tells one to another, watching figures dance their way across a sketched out bar.

“And cried, too,” the other replies, as they take an offered page, cool fingers brushing as they move.

Above them, a man with green eyes catches a sheet out of the air. He looks towards the wall, where a man in a silver suit with wings on his shoes smiles and tips his head, disappearing. And this man, this grieving god, looks down onto the page. And his heart breaks.

He turns to find his husband.

* * *

“What are you afraid of?” Aiba asks his husband’s back.

“What,” Jun keeps his back to him, lifting a glass of amber whisky to his lips.

“He’s just a boy in love,” Aiba tells him, and Jun sighs.

“Have a drink with me,” he says in reply, beginning to pour another glass.

Aiba shakes his head. “No,” he states. “I’ve had enough.”

“Well, that’s too bad.” Jun turns to face him. Aiba steps towards him.

“Please,” he says. “That boy loves Nino, the kind of love that you and I once had. How long has it been, for you and I?”

“Since the world began.”

“And you know I don’t mind if you look at others, if you take an...interest.”

Jun places his glass back on the platter. “That little bird means nothing to me.”

Aiba doesn’t react, in relief nor anger. “I know,” he says instead. “But he means everything, to him.”

Jun looks tranquilly at him, untouched. “So?”

“So,” Aiba pleads. “Let them go. Jun-” 

Jun starts, it’s been so long since he’s called him by name.

Aiba continues, oblivious. “My husband, my love, if you had heard Nino’s song, saw the pages of paintings that Ohno drew, your heart would break for their poor souls. There’s nothing but grief left in them, nothing but the love they have for one another. How long will you let this go on, let them be in such unending pain?”

Jun scoffs, eyes rolling as he replies. “Husband, your softness has no place here. The canary will stay for as long as I desire, and his lover will either leave or be fed to my fires, to burn my kingdom and keep your lights bright. Nothing good comes from letting them go- you show them a crack in the wall, and they tear it from the seams. Let your heart be moved by a few scribbles, and the whole city will fall.”

“What does the artist care for the logic of kings?” Aiba demands. “All he cares for is for his lover, the boy that found breath he doesn’t have, all to sing one last song for him. He cares so much that he drew his way past the wall, that he brought life down to this necropolis.”

“You and your pity don’t fit in my bed,” Jun spits out. “All this time you’ve kept me waiting, in our room, in our sheets. And all you come to me for is to plead for the lives of a few fools, and still, you expect me to obey? How _long_ will you keep me waiting?”

Aiba looks back at him steadily. “For as long as I am your husband,” he replies, as immovable as the roots of an ancient oak. “It’s true that I make you wait half the year, but every six months, aren’t I back down here? Husband, you know as well as I that the earth must still turn, must still come alive. You _know_ that I always come back, lover- Ohno doesn’t.”

Jun turns away. Looks into his city.

“Fine,” he says finally. “Bring the boy.”

* * *

“Three days,” Jun says, an ultimatum. Ohno stands before his throne, a boy staring into the eyes of a king. Nino stands beside him, the back of their hands brushing. “Since my husband is such a fan, I’ll give you three days to me a work of art that will make this king feel young again. Fail, and you’ll stay down here with your lover.” his lips curl slightly. “It takes a lot of souls to power all the lights, after all, and I could always use more fuel for my furnaces..”

“Satoshi, don’t-” Nino begins, but Ohno is already nodding.

“I’ll do it,” he says. “And if I succeed, you’ll let Nino go.”

“We’ll see about that,” Jun murmurs, then waves a hand. “Take what you need, artist, and be quick about it. Your time has already begun.”

* * *

“If he fails, he’ll never see him again,” Aiba points out. “What’s the harm of letting them meet while they can?”

“So soft,” Jun scoffs. At Aiba’s dark look, he scowls. “Fine. Three hours, that’s all I’ll give. The artist can have the little songbird for three hours every day. No more, no less.”

Aiba sees the stone in his face, and knows it is the best he will have. Three hours, in a world where there is no sleep, no rest, no reprieve.

“Three hours,” he agrees wearily, and remembers a painting of a garden, and the echoes of an old, old song.

* * *

Jun visits Ohno while he works, watching the living boy paint the walls with sweeping brushstrokes. Speaks.

“You know, young artist, I was once a young man too,” he comments. Ohno doesn't turn around, doesn't acknowledge his words. “I once fell for someone, just like you. Once tried to change the world for him.” he surveys his surroundings, unimpressed. “But now you know how it feels- lovers are always slipping from your grasp, leaving you with naught but the chill.”

Ohno shivers, and Jun smiles. “Let me give you some advice, boy, from a man no longer young,” he says. “If you want to keep your lover by your side- hang a chain around his throat, make it heavy with clasps of gold. Shackle his wrists with silver and opal, weigh his pockets with diamonds and jade. Bind him to you with a golden band,” he flashes his hand, the glint of gold on his finger. Turns around. “Just some advice from an old man.”

Ohno paints faster.

* * *

Everybody knows the walls have ears, and the workers of Hadestown began to whisper, as rumors spread of a young man whose painting were so beautiful they moved the king of the underworld. One after another, the people who began to regain their memories began to raise their heads. Began to ask.

_“Is it true?”_

* * *

“Let me tell you something, from a man that was once like you,” Aiba says to Nino, as they walk towards his lover’s room. He holds a glass of whisky in his hand, and pushes another into Nino’s dead hands. “I was once hungry too. Hungry for the underworld, for the taste of pomegranate wine.” he looks at Nino evenly, swirling his liquor. “Now you know how it tastes, songbird- spit it out, you might still have time.”

Nino grips his glass. Doesn’t reply. Aiba sighs.

“Now that I’m no longer young, I can tell you that there’s no joy in a gilded cage,” he gestures outside, towards the factories that run day and night. “All this jade and these golden chains- they don’t mean a thing when it comes to love.” he takes a drag of his glass, and glances at Nino with distant eyes. “Love was when he first came to me, taking my hands in his. He asked for my hand on bended knees, the dirt at our feet scattered with ruby seeds. We never needed a wedding band, never needed walls or chains. And that’s when I took his hand.” his eyes harden. “But that was a long time ago, in another world.”

They reach the door, and Aiba kisses his forehead. Nino smiles back, pushes the door open, and goes to sing a song for his lover.

* * *

As the days passed, the whispers grew into a stanza, and then grew into a chant.

“He promised us shelter,” said one.

“He promised us safety,” echoed another.

“He said that we could rest, with the walls protecting us, that we would be free.”

The walls have ears, and the chant began to spread.

* * *

Jun stands in front of the doors to Ohno’s creation, Aiba beside him.

“He’s dangerous,” Jun says. “People are talking.”

“He’s determined,” Aiba replies. “People want him to succeed.”

They open the doors, and step inside.

* * *

Once upon a time, a poor boy promised a hungry young man that his art would reshape the world. Make it beautiful, for him.

And as the lord of Hadestown steps into the room that Ohno has stayed in for three days, the world does change. Just for a moment, down in the neon city he built, the lord of the underworld becomes young again. He becomes the young god standing in the garden where he saw a beautiful boy filled with spring, the Jun who first took his husband by the hand, drawn in by the light in his eyes and the scent of honeysuckle in the air.

“It’s our garden,” Masaki murmurs, and he looks younger, too, coming alive as he feels the grass beneath his feet.

“It’s impossible,” Jun says. Masaki turns to him, eyes bright.

“It’s true,” he says, and takes his hands.

* * *

The lord husband’s words echo, carried on by three women hiding in the wind.

_It’s true._

People begin to stir.

* * *

Jun sits upon his throne, looking down at the lovers waiting for his judgement.

 _“If you let him go_ , _”_ whispers a fate. _“You’ll forever lose control. There’s no respect afforded to those who can’t keep their word.”_

 _“If you keep him here,”_ whispers another. _“You’ll forever have a martyr, and soon the city will quake, and your kingdom be lost.”_

He makes a decision.

“You can leave, and take your lover as you go,” he says, but before Ohno can lift his head in joy, before Nino’s eyes fill with relief, he continues. “But you will stay in front of him as you leave, and you will not look back until you’re both above the underworld’s walls. If you make it out like this, the little bird is yours to keep for the rest of your lives.”

“And if he fails?” Nino dares to ask.

“You return,” Jun tells him. “And you-” he turns to Ohno “Will stay above, alone.”

Ohno swallows.

“I’ll do it,” he says, and Jun nods.

“Take him to the gates,” he tells Aiba. “And let them be on their way. I will not be so lenient, the next time.”

“Of course,” Aiba says, hiding a smile of relief, and leads the lovers out of the palace.

* * *

“Wait for me,” Nino says, kissing Ohno with cool lips before letting go of his hands.

“I will,” Ohno promises, and begins to walk.

* * *

“You let them go,” Aiba says, when he returns.

“I let them try,” Jun responds. “It was the only way.”

Aiba looks unconvinced, still smiling like him like he’d done so long ago. “And you and I?” he asks. “Are you going to let us try?”

Jun looks at him, taking in the brightness of his eyes, outshining every chain and bauble he’s ever made. “Is it too late? Spring is almost here.”

Aiba walks up to him, folds his knees beneath him as he takes Jun’s hands. Brings them to his lips. “Wait for me, then,” he murmurs onto cold skin. “Until I return.”

Jun moves one of his hands so that it cups Aiba’s cheek. “I will.”

* * *

The tunnels are darker than he remembers, and so, so quiet. Doubt comes in and brushes his arms, strips away warmth, leaves behind the scent of ash.

 _“There’s no steps behind you, no hint of a song,”_ the winds taunt, sharp across his face, cutting into his arms as he closes his eyes, keeps on walking.

“Kazu?” he calls, but nothing but his own echoes return to him.

* * *

“I’m right here, I’m right behind,” Nino calls back, futile, and watches his lover walk against the wind.

* * *

The rocks grow narrower, and Ohno smells the earth and chill as he moves forward. The earth, the chill, but no mine-ash, no diamond-dust. Doubt moves closer and takes away his voice, leaving the echoes of a song he can no longer hear.

 _“The little bird is so easily lost,”_ the fates mock. _“At the whim of gods, left to wander on his own.”_

“It’s going to be okay,” he calls, and there’s no answer behind him.

* * *

“We’re going to be okay,” Nino tells his lover’s back, unheard, as he watches him navigate pitch black walls. “Remember, my love, that the cold and the dark are promises of a spring to come. We’re almost there.”

* * *

Is that a crack of sunlight, or another illusion? Ohno resists the urge to peek at his periphery. To pause in his steps. Hesitation drags his feet, the fear that every step is another away from his lover. Doubt crawls itself in inch by inch, with tricky fingers and fickle tongues, taking with it memories of what the world could be, leaving only what it is.

 _“Where are the footsteps the gods promised would follow?”_ three spirits cackle in his ear. _“Where are the songs that your songbird had always sung?”_

“You’re here,” he says, tells himself, moving towards the growing pinprick of light. “You’re right behind.”

He’s answered with silence.

* * *

“I’m right behind, Satoshi. I’m still singing for you,” Nino promises. “I’ve always been here, singing. Just keep walking, until the dark turns into dawn. Didn’t you tell me to believe in you? Believe in me, too.”

* * *

Ohno climbs the last few steps, rocks sliding from his grip as he reaches towards the light. He grabs a handful of dirt, pulls himself out, and hears the roar of a train, the sound of the breeze.

And nothing else.

He pulls himself forward.

Nothing.

Another second.

Nothing.

And then-

He

  


looks

  
  


back.

  
  


“You’re early,” Nino says, face shadowed by the darkness of the cave.

“I missed you,” Ohno whispers back, and watches as he is swallowed by darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> um, sorry?
> 
> but on the bright side, there _will_ be an epilogue! probably tomorrow.
> 
> songs from this chapter (if you want to feel even worse):
> 
> [wait for me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nKTH0zx_H8)/[way down hadestown ii](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMX90HtVmPc)/[come home with me ii](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVrphqWB4_A)/[how long](https://youtu.be/Bim5CXHgy3s)/[chant ii](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd4O4bKz7rA)/[wait for me ii](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IdQGDafaAg)/[doubt comes in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPM3s_MJ88Y)


	4. epilogue//spring

This is how the story ends: a young man at the side of a railway track, down on bent knees.

* * *

Except...it isn’t. Because spring comes again, that year, bringing with it a man stepping from a railway car, his husband’s eyes on his back. And that man - that god - brought sunshine and summer to the world again, and with it, a story.

He tells the story of a poor young artist, who nevertheless had a gift: he could make people see the world the way it could be, instead of what it is. He tells the story of a love that was strong enough to shake the underworld, to bring spring back into the land of the dead. And he raises his cup, for the lovers that tried against all odds to be reunited again, who came so close. And as he tells this story, it begins to spread, one person telling another, the story being repeated again and again, both in the world of the living and in the world of the dead. And people wept for the poor artist that moved the king of the dead, and they wept for the poor songbird who sang his lover out of the underworld. And they wept for what could have been.

Ohno, for his part, sits in the small attic that used to be for two, and draws. And draws. And draws.

And every year when fall comes in, the god of spring comes in and takes a few pieces, leaving flowers and wine and crates of fruit in his wake.

And every year when that god returns to the underworld, to his husband (who is waiting for him, always, in the room that they now share, the room that was once a garden), he brings the pages down to the factories, and finds the boy that is humming to himself, singing songs in the world that used to only know silence. And he gives him the pages, and they embrace, and he leaves the workers flowers and moonlight, because his husband has finally learned that even in the dark, life can still flourish.

Spring comes again the next year. And the next, and the next, and the next. One after another, until we reach another end.

This time, there is a boy - a man - sitting in an attic, waiting, as a god in a silver suit and wings on his shoes knocks on his door. He hands the man a golden coin, and tips his hat. They walk together along the railway line, until they see a figure all in black at the edge of the tunnel.

“You have a ticket, this time,” Jun comments, taking the gold coin from Ohno’s still-warm hands. Sho steps back from him, fades into the wind with a smile goodbye for an old friend.

Ohno shrugs. “I thought I’d still try the long way down, for nostalgia’s sake.”

The king of the underworld quirks a smile, and shakes his head. “He’ll be quite disappointed if you take any longer than you need to, this time around.” And the old artist smiles as he follows the mighty lord into the train, as it pulls into the station six feet below. 

He steps out, and takes his lover’s hands.

“Come home with me,” Nino says.

“Always, if it’s you.” Ohno replies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's all she wrote


End file.
